Third International Workshop on Network Theory:Web Science Meets Network Science

March 4–6, 2011Northwestern University

Allen Center, Room 211

2169 Campus Drive

Evanston, Illinois

http://sonic.northwestern.edu/events/webnetsciworkshop

Twitter hash tag: #WebNetSci

Third International Workshop on Network Theory: Web Science Meets

Network Science is organized by the Science of Networks in Communities

(SONIC) Laboratory at Northwestern University, the Annenberg Network of Net-

works (ANN) at the University of Southern California, and the Northwestern Institute

on Complex Systems (NICO).

Noshir Contractor, SONIC

Manuel Castells, ANN

Peter Monge, ANN

Kevin Lynch, NICO

Brian Uzzi, NICO

First International Workshop on Network Theory: Interdisciplinary

Approaches to Social Network Theory, September 15–16, 2006, Annenberg

Center for Communication, University of Southern California, Los Angeles

Second International Workshop on Network Theory: Network Multidimension-

ality in the Digital Age, February 19–20, 2010, Annenberg Research Park,

University of Southern California, Los Angeles

S O N I C

advancing the science of networks in communities

Schedule

March 4

6 p.m. Registration and welcome reception

March 58 a.m.WelcomeJulio Ottino, dean, Robert R. McCormick School of Engineering and Applied Science

8:15 a.m.Web/Net Science versus EngineeringNoshir Contractor, panel chair

8:15 a.m.Discover, Understand, Engineer: Why This Sequence Is So Challenging in Emerging SystemsLuís A. Nunes Amaral

9 a.m.Engineering the Web for a Scale-Free SocietyTim Berners-Lee

9:45 a.m.Break

10 a.m.Web/Net Science at ScaleManuel Castells, panel chair

10 a.m.Rhythms of Information Flow through NetworksJure Leskovec

10:45 a.m.Social Networks Caught in the WebLada A. Adamic

11:30 a.m.Photo

11:45 a.m.Lunch

1 p.m.Is the Web Just Another Network?Brian Uzzi, panel chair

1 p.m.From the WWW to Network Science: Why Was Google’s Pagerank Successful After All?

Albert-László Barabási

1:45 p.m.Semantic Web ScienceJames Hendler

2:30 p.mBreak

2:45 p.m.Modeling the Web — Data Mining versus Theory BuildingPeter Monge, panel chair

2:45 p.m.Web Structure Mining and Information Network Analysis: An Integrated ApproachJiawei Han

3:30 p.m.Modeling the Web: The Interaction between Theory Building and Data-Driven Discovery Marshall Scott Poole

4:15 p.m. Break

4:30 p.m.Causality in Web/Net ScienceKevin Lynch, panel chair

4:30 p.m.Network Autocorrelation: Causality and Culture Wars Michael Macy

5:15 p.m.Causality in NetworksSinan Aral

6 p.m.Cocktail reception

6:30 p.m.Dinner

7:30 p.m.WelcomeBarbara J. O’Keefe, dean, School of Communication

7:45 p.m.Collaborative Problem Solving in NetworksDuncan Watts, with Noshir Contractor, moderator

March 6

8:30 a.m.Using Web/Net Science to Understand SciencePeter Monge, panel chair

8:30 a.m.Interactive Maps of Science and TechnologyKaty Börner

9:15 a.m.Web of Science, Multidisciplinarity, and Scientific Impact through TimeBrian Uzzi

10 a.m.Break

10:15 a.m.Envisioning a “Web Index”Nigel Shadbolt, moderator

11:30 a.m.Closing discussion Noshir Contractor, moderator

Lada A. Adamic

Social Networks Caught in the Web

Social networks have found many uses on the web:

from discovering content to finding answers, and

even to finding a physical couch to sleep on. Binary

designations of friendship, embodied in hyperlinks, yield

interesting insights on social processes in aggregate but

can be unreliable indicators at the level of the individual.

To address this, online social networking sites can elicit

person-to-person ratings, but this involves quantifying

inherently subjective feelings, such as friendship and

trust. To complicate matters, individuals may formulate

their ratings differently if these are shown to others, and

if those others can reciprocate. This study combines

data analysis of several online data sets. For one such

social network, CouchSurfing.org, findings from a large-

scale survey and in-depth interviews will be discussed

to examine from multiple angles the challenges that

users have in providing useful and truthful ratings.

We find, for example, that the potential to reciprocate

produces higher and more correlated ratings than when

individuals are unable to see how others rated them.

Ratings further can depend on the gender and nationali-

ties of the raters and ratees. These findings indicate that

social networks on the web should not be taken at face

value without considering social nuances.

Luís A. Nunes Amaral

Discover, Understand, Engineer: Why This

Sequence Is So Challenging in Emerging Systems

The temptation to build understanding of a complex

system up from basic principles is the siren song of

science (see the “theory of everything”). While this has

clear appeal, it faces many difficulties in practice, some

potentially insurmountable. This presentation will advo-

cate for scale-specific approaches to the understanding

of complex systems such as the web.

Sinan Aral

Causality in Networks

Many of us are interested in whether networks

“matter.” Whether in the spread of disease, the

diffusion of information, the propagation of behavioral

contagions, the effectiveness of viral marketing, or

the magnitude of peer effects in a variety of settings,

a key question that must first be answered is whether

the statistical relationships we see can be interpreted

causally. Several sources of bias in analysis of inter-

actions and outcomes among peers can confound

assessments of peer influence and social contagion in

networks. If uncorrected, these biases can lead

researchers to attribute observed correlations to causal

peer influence, resulting in misinterpretations of social

network effects as well as biased estimates of the

potential effectiveness of different intervention strate-

gies. Several approaches for identifying peer effects

have been proposed. However, randomized trials are

considered to be one of the most effective ways to

obtain unbiased estimates of causal peer effects. This

presentation will review the importance of establishing

causality in networks and the various methods that have

been proposed to address causal inference in networks,

and in particular will focus on the use of randomized

trials to establish causality. An example will be provided

from a randomized field experiment conducted on a

popular social networking website to test the effective-

ness of “viral product design” strategies in creating peer

influence and social contagion among the 1.4 million

friends of 9,687 experimental users. In addition to

estimating the effects of viral product design on social

contagion and product diffusion, this work provides a

model for how randomized trials can be used to identify

peer influence effects in networks.

Abstracts

Albert-László Barabási

From the WWW to Network Science: Why Was

Google’s Pagerank Successful After All?

The World Wide Web played a key role in the emer -

gence of network science, serving as both the medium

and the testbed for much of this emerging area. This

presentation will discuss the structure of the web

and its impact on the processes taking place on it.

For example, Pagerank — probably the best-known

network-based algorithm, and the engine behind

Google’s early success — is a network-based dif-

fusion algorithm. Yet little is known about how the

structure of the network on which it operates affects

its performance. Pagerank performance will be shown

to be rather sensitive to the structure of the underlying

network. For random networks the ranking provided

by Pagerank is rather sensitive to perturbations in the

network structure; in contrast, for scale-free networks

a few super-stable nodes emerge whose ranking is

independent of which other nodes point to them, mak-

ing their ranking exceptionally stable to perturbations.

This research predicts how the number of super-stable

nodes depends on network characteristics and demon-

strates their presence in a number of real networks, in

agreement with the analytical predictions.

Tim Berners-Lee

Engineering the Web for a Scale-Free Society

Analysis of the existing web shows that it has scale-free

properties like many other networks. How does this

affect engineering decisions when we design protocols

for new systems on the web? How should people

behave in order to create a scale-free society?

Katy Börner

Interactive Maps of Science and Technology

Maps of science and technology aim to communicate

the results of different types of analyses, such as tem-

poral, geospatial, topical, and network analysis, as well

as modeling efforts to help answer when, where, what,

with whom, and why questions, respectively. Maps

might show different scales such as micro/individual

(1–100 records), meso/local (101–10,000 records), or

macro/global (10,000 or more records). They might be

presented as static high-resolution printouts on paper

or as interactive yet lower-resolution applications and

services on handheld devices, desktop monitors, or

large display walls. This talk will present recent develop-

ments in the design of interactive maps of science and

technology together with possible future developments

involving the Semantic Web.

Jiawei Han

Web Structure Mining and Information Network

Analysis: An Integrated Approach

Data mining on the web has many attractive facets. This

presentation will examine one aspect: how to mine web

structures and integrate web structures and contents

with other (semi-)structured data sources to help in

modeling the web using data mining and information

network analysis techniques. It will be shown that many

websites or web subnetworks have relatively organized

structures, and such structures can be mined using our

recently developed web structure mining techniques.

By integrating web structure mining, content mining,

and some (semi-)structured data sources available, het-

erogeneous information networks can be constructed

and mined so that web modeling can be performed

successfully, with rich and interesting information dis-

covered from the web.

Introduced as a concrete case study is WINACS

(Web-based Information Network Analyzer for Comput-

er Science), a project that incorporates many exciting

recent developments in data sciences to construct a

web-based computer science information network and

to discover, retrieve, rank, cluster, and analyze such

web-induced information networks. Taking computer

science as a dedicated domain, WINACS first discov-

ers web entity structures, integrating the contents in

the DBLP database with that on the web to construct a

heterogeneous computer science information network.

With this structure in hand, WINACS is able to rank,

cluster, and analyze this network and support intel-

ligent and analytical queries. Currently being explored

are methodologies on mining such structured informa-

tion networks, which have introduced several interest-

ing new mining methodologies, including integrated

ranking and clustering, classification, role discovery,

data integration, data validation, and similarity search.

This presentation will show that structured informa-

tion networks are informative and that link analysis on

such networks becomes powerful at uncovering critical

knowledge hidden in large web-based information net-

works. Therefore, it is envisioned that web modeling can

be performed effectively by further development and

integration of web structure mining and heterogeneous

information network technologies.

James Hendler

Semantic Web Science

In exploring the relationship between the web and other

networks, it is important to consider more than just the

traditional unlabeled web graph. This presentation will

briefly cover the emerging “web of data” being brought

into existence via linked data. A few of the uses of

Semantic Web technology in practice will be presented,

leading to a demonstration of how the labeled graphs

created may be of interest as a network graph in its

own right.

Jure Leskovec

Rhythms of Information Flow through Networks

The information we experience online comes to us con-

tinuously over time, assembled from many small pieces,

and conveyed through our social networks. This merg-

ing of information, network structure, and flow over time

requires new ways of reasoning about the large-scale

behavior of information networks. This presentation will

discuss a set of approaches for tracking information as

it travels and mutates in online networks, showing how

to capture and model temporal patterns in the news

over a daily time-scale — in particular, the succession

of story lines that evolve and compete for attention.

The discussion will also explore models to quantify the

influence of individual media sites on the popularity of

news stories and algorithms for inferring latent informa-

tion diffusion networks.

Michael Macy

Network Autocorrelation: Causality and

Culture Wars

Although Gore beat Bush by a razor-thin 0.5 percent of

the popular vote, the winning margin approached land-

slide proportions in many counties, a paradox popular-

ized by Bill Bishop in The Big Sort. The local clustering

of opinions in demographically or regionally divided

groups can lead to violent conflict, which in turn invites

scholars to posit collective interests as the causal driver

(e.g., Aljazeera, 1/29/11: “Many think that the recent

protests in Egypt and Tunisia are largely motivated by

economic fears …”). However, a more parsimonious

explanation is network autocorrelation. The self-

reinforcing dynamics of homophily and influence can

generate locally homogenous clusters in which beliefs

on widely disparate issues can become aligned with

one another and with a salient demographic dimen-

sion or spatial location, such that it becomes possible

to predict a person’s positions on logically and caus-

ally unrelated issues by knowing just one of his or her

beliefs or even zip code. With network autocorrelation,

political or religious polarization is not just the tendency

for people to take extreme positions. More important,

it is the tendency for positions on multiple issues to

become aligned with one another and with demo-

graphic identities. The tragedy of autocorrelation is that

the clustering of opinion can lead to intense, persistent,

and sometimes violent in-group/out-group conflict

even if the particular combinations of positions (e.g., on

government regulation of abortion, gun ownership, and

spousal choice) are largely arbitrary. The consequences

can be tragic for scholars as well. The IID assumption

in multivariate models of opinion formation can make

observed covariance highly vulnerable to spurious asso-

ciation. Recent methodological advances (e.g., SIENA)

that address this problem for small networks do not

scale up to “big data,” posing an important challenge

when web science meets traditional network science. 

Marshall Scott Poole

Modeling the Web: The Interaction Between

Theory Building and Data-Driven Discovery

The coming decade presents an opportunity for the

social and behavioral sciences (SBS) to transform

themselves in ways that parallel the transformation

of the physical and biological sciences over the past

two decades. Advances in high-performance and

data-intensive computing that now allow researchers

to query huge digital datasets and use computational

analytics offer the SBS the opportunity to conduct

unprecedented inquiries into the nature of the web.

Social and behavioral scientists have traditionally

adopted theory-driven approaches to compensate for

the relatively small numbers of observations (making

it difficult to know if we have a dependable “fact” to

explore) and error in these observations (making it

difficult to know if we have a reliable “fact” to explore).

Theory compensates for these shortcomings by

enabling the researcher to project plausible theoretical

constructs onto limited and unreliable data. However,

if inquiry is only theory driven, our attention is directed

to where the theory points us, and we are deprived of

an important driver of discovery that is available to the

physical and biological sciences — a body of unex-

plained yet dependable and reliable facts that pose a

puzzle, something that requires explanation.

Computational advances and the availability of

huge stores of essentially error-free digital data enable

data-driven discovery (D3) to complement theory build-

ing. This talk will explore the relationship between theory

and D3 and how productive cycling between the two

can be promoted. It will consider how theorists might

think about D3 and how D3 can be managed to yield

results valuable for different types of social and behav-

ioral science theorizing.

Brian Uzzi

Web of Science, Multidisciplinarity, and Scientific

Impact through Time

All 26 million research papers in the web of science,

circa 1945–2005, were analyzed to construct an index

of each paper’s multidisciplinarity. The findings indicate

that multidisciplinarity is significantly associated with a

paper’s impact up to a threshold after which the effect

reverses; the impact of multidisciplinarity is steadily

increasing, and teams are more likely than individual

authors to publish papers high in multidisciplinarity.

Duncan Watts

Collaborative Problem Solving in Networks

Complex problem solving in science, business, and

engineering frequently necessitates a tradeoff between

exploitation of known solutions and exploration of new

possibilities. When complex problems are solved by

collectives rather than individuals, moreover, both the

explore-exploit tradeoff and the success of the collec-

tive can depend on the structure of the communication

networks via which problem solvers learn from each

others’ experience. This presentation will address col-

laborative learning in networks in the context of a series

of web-based experiments in which networks of 16

individuals connected by one of eight distinct topolo-

gies collectively solved a complex problem. The discus-

sion will also explore some implications for real-world

problem solving, along with some potential advantages

of web-based platforms for conducting macrosociologi-

cal experiments.

Robert Ackland is a fellow at the

Australian National University, where he

earned his PhD. He leads the Virtual

Observatory for the Study of Online

Networks project, coordinates the

ANU’s master of social research program, teaches

courses on the social science of the Internet and online

research methods, and conducts empirical social

science research into online social and organizational

networks. Ackland has been chief investigator on four

Australian Research Council grants and in 2007 was a

United Kingdom National Centre for e-Social Science

visiting fellow at the Oxford Internet Institute.

Lada A. Adamic is an associate

professor in the School of Information

at the University of Michigan, where

she is also affiliated with the Center for

the Study of Complex Systems and the

College of Engineering’s Department of Electrical

Engineering and Computer Science. Her research

interests center on information dynamics in networks:

how information diffuses, how it can be found, and how

it influences the evolution of a network’s structure. Her

projects have included identifying expertise in online

question-and-answer forums, studying the dynamics of

viral marketing, and characterizing the structure of blogs

and other online communities. Adamic earned her PhD

from Stanford University.

Luís A. Nunes Amaral is professor of

chemical and biological engineering in

the McCormick School of Engineering

and Applied Science at Northwestern

University. Amaral conducts and directs

research that provides insight into the emergence,

evolution, and stability of complex systems. This

research — featured in numerous media sources both in

the United States and abroad — aims to address some

of the most pressing challenges facing human societies

and the world’s ecosystems, including the mitigation of

errors in health care settings, the characterization of

conditions fostering innovation and creativity, and the

growth limits imposed by sustainability. Recipient of a

CAREER award from the National Institutes of Health,

Amaral was named to the 2006 class of Distinguished

Young Scholars in Medical Research by the Keck

Foundation and has been selected as an Earlier Career

Scientist by the Howard Hughes Medical Institute.

Sinan Aral is a faculty member in the

Department of Information, Operations,

and Management Sciences at New

York University’s Stern School of

Business and an affiliated faculty

member at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology,

where he earned his PhD. His research focuses on

measuring and managing how information diffusion in

massive social networks affects information worker

productivity, consumer demand, and viral marketing as

well as the role of information and information technol-

ogy in firms’ productivity and performance. Honors for

his research include the Microsoft Faculty Award, a

National Science Foundation Early Career Development

(CAREER) Award, four International Conference on

Information Systems paper awards, the Association for

Computing Machinery SIGMIS Best Dissertation Award,

and the IBM Faculty Award. A Phi Beta Kappa graduate

of Northwestern University and a past Fulbright Scholar,

he is an organizer of the Workshop on Information in

Networks. Aral’s work has been published or is forth-

coming in such leading journals as the American Journal

of Sociology, Management Science, Marketing Science,

the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences,

Science, Organization Science, and the Sloan Manage-

ment Review.

Participants

Albert-László Barabási is a Distin-

guished University Professor at

Northeastern University, where he

directs the Center for Complex

Network Research and holds appoint-

ments in the Departments of Physics, Computer

Science, and Biology. Also a member of the Center for

Cancer Systems Biology at the Dana Farber Cancer

Institute, he holds additional appointments in the

Department of Medicine of Harvard Medical School

and Brigham and Women’s Hospital. Previously he was

Emil T. Hofman Professor at the University of Notre

Dame. His books include Bursts: The Hidden Pattern

Behind Everything We Do (Dutton, 2010), available in

five languages; Linked: The New Science of Networks

(Perseus, 2002), available in eleven languages; as

coauthor, Fractal Concepts in Surface Growth

(Cambridge, 1995); and as coeditor, The Structure and

Dynamics of Networks (Princeton, 2005). His work led

to the discovery of scale-free networks in 1999 and to

the Barabási-Albert model for explaining their wide-

spread emergence in natural, technological, and social

systems. Barabási’s research on complex networks has

been widely featured in the media, including coverage in

Nature, Science, Science News, the New York Times,

USA Today, the Washington Post, American Scientist,

Discover, Business Week, Die Zeit, El Pais, Le Monde,

London’s Daily Telegraph, National Geographic, the

Chronicle of Higher Education, New Scientist, and

La Republica, as well as on BBC Radio, National Public

Radio, CBS, ABC, CNN, and NBC. A fellow of the

American Physical Society and an elected member of

the Hungarian Academy of Sciences and the Academia

Europaea, Barabási was awarded the Federation of

European Biochemical Societies’ Anniversary Prize for

Systems Biology, the John von Neumann Computer

Society’s John von Neumann Medal, the NEC C&C

Foundation’s C&C Prize, and the National Academy

of Sciences’ Cozzarelli Prize. He holds a PhD from

Boston University.

Tim Berners-Lee is the 3Com

Founders Professor of Engineering in

the School of Engineering with a joint

appointment in the Department of

Electrical Engineering and Computer

Science at the Laboratory for Computer Science and

Artificial Intelligence at the Massachusetts Institute of

Technology, where he also heads the Decentralized

Information Group. He is also a professor in the School

of Electronics and Computer Science at the United

Kingdom’s University of Southampton. A graduate of

the University of Oxford, Berners-Lee invented the

World Wide Web, an Internet-based hypermedia

initiative for global information sharing, in 1989 while at

CERN, the European Particle Physics Laboratory; his

specifications of URLs, HTTP, and HTML were refined

as web technology spread. Berners-Lee is the director

of the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C), a founding

director of the Web Science Trust, and a director of the

World Wide Web Foundation. Named a fellow of the

Royal Society in 2001, he is the recipient of the Japan

Prize, the Prince of Asturias Foundation Prize, the

Millennium Technology Prize, and Germany’s Die

Quadriga award. Berners-Lee was knighted by Queen

Elizabeth II in 2004 and awarded the Order of Merit in

2007. In 2009 he was elected a foreign associate of the

National Academy of Sciences. He is the author of

Weaving the Web (Harper, 2000).

Pablo J. Boczkowski is professor of

media, technology, and society at

Northwestern University’s School of

Communication and a 2010–11 visiting

scholar at the University of Chicago’s

Booth School of Business. Previously he was the Cecil

and Ida Green Career Development Assistant Professor

of Organization Studies at the Massachusetts Institute

of Technology’s Sloan School of Management. He is

the author of Digitizing the News: Innovation in Online

Newspapers (MIT, 2004), News at Work: Imitation in

an Age of Information Abundance (University of

Chicago, 2010), and more than 20 papers and 50

conference presentations. Boczkowski earned his PhD

at Cornell University.

Katy Börner is the Victor H. Yngve

Professor of Information Science at the

School of Library and Information

Science at Indiana University, where

she is also adjunct professor in the

School of Informatics and Computing and the Depart-

ment of Statistics of the College of Arts and Sciences, a

member of the cognitive science core faculty, a research

affiliate of the Biocomplexity Institute, a fellow of the

Center for Research on Learning and Technology, a

member of the Advanced Visualization Laboratory, and

founding director of the Cyberinfrastructure for Network

Science Center. Börner is a curator of the Places &

Spaces: Mapping Science exhibit. Her research focuses

on the development of data analysis and visualization

techniques for information access, understanding, and

management. Particular interests include the study of

the structure and evolution of scientific disciplines, the

analysis and visualization of online activity, and the

development of cyberinfrastructures for large-scale

scientific collaboration and computation. Börner is the

coeditor of Visual Interfaces to Digital Libraries (Springer,

2002) and the “Mapping Knowledge Domains” special

issue of the Proceedings of the National Academy of

Sciences (2004) as well as the author of Atlas of

Science: Guiding the Navigation and Management of

Scholarly Knowledge (MIT, 2010). She earned her PhD

from the University of Kaiserslautern.

Dirk Brockmann is associate profes-

sor in the Department of Engineering

Sciences and Applied Mathematics in

the McCormick School of Engineering

and Applied Science at Northwestern

University. His research focuses on complex systems,

modeling the spatial spread of epidemics, human

mobility, and complex networks using methods from

theoretical and computational physics. He also works

on the use of pervasive large-scale datasets to under-

stand human behavior and the development of methods

to exploit these datasets to improve models for dynami-

cal phenomena mediated by human interactions and

mobility. Brockmann holds a PhD from Georg-August-

Universität Göttingen.

Ronald S. Burt is the Hobart W.

Williams Professor of Sociology and

Strategy in the Booth School of

Business at the University of Chicago,

where he earned his PhD. Previously

he served on the faculties of Columbia University and

the University of California, Berkeley. Burt’s research

focuses on how networks create advantage for organi-

zations and individuals. He took a leave in 1999 to study

European business as the Shell Professor of Human

Resources at INSEAD, then a second leave in 2000 to

explore practical implementation as the vice president of

strategic learning for Raytheon Company. Burt’s three

most recent books are Structural Holes: The Social

Structure of Competition (Harvard, 1992), introducing

the concept of structural holes; Brokerage and Closure:

An Introduction to Social Capital (Oxford, 2005), a broad

review linking network structure with performance; and

Neighbor Networks: Competitive Advantage Local and

Personal (Oxford, 2010), which presents argument

and evidence on the social psychology of network

advantage.

Fabián E. Bustamante is an associ-

ate professor of computer science

in the Department of Electrical Engi-

neering and Computer Science at

Northwestern University, where he also

leads the AquaLab, a group investigating systems

issues with Internet-scale distributed computing. His

work focuses on the opportunities and challenges

of complex networked systems and is informed

by the unique perspective contributed by the more

than 1.3 million worldwide users of their software. A

senior member of both the Association for Computing

Machinery and IEEE, Bustamante is a recipient of a

National Science Foundation CAREER award and

the E. T. S. Watson Fellowship Award from the Science

Foundation of Ireland. He earned his PhD from the

Georgia Institute of Technology.

Manuel Castells is University Profes-

sor and the Wallis Annenberg Chair in

Communication Technology and

Society at the University of Southern

California as well as professor of

sociology at Barcelona’s Open University of Catalonia,

distinguished visiting professor of technology and

society at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology,

and distinguished visiting professor of Internet studies at

the University of Oxford. Previously he was professor of

planning and of sociology at the University of California,

Berkeley. His 24 published books include the trilogy

The Information Age: Economy, Society, and Culture

(Blackwell, 1996–2000), translated into 22 languages,

and The Internet Galaxy (Oxford, 2001), translated into

17 languages. Recipient of 14 honorary doctorates, he

is a fellow of the American Academy of Political and

Social Science, the Academia Europaea, the British

Academy, the Mexican Academy, and the Spanish

Royal Academy of Economics. Castells was a founding

member of the European Research Council and is a

member of the board of the European Institute of

Innovation and Technology and of the Scholars’ Council

at the US Library of Congress. He holds two doctorates

from the University of Paris–Sorbonne.

Noshir Contractor is the Jane S. and

William J. White Professor of Behav-

ioral Sciences in the McCormick

School of Engineering and Applied

Science, the School of Communica-

tion, and the Kellogg School of Management at North-

western University, where he is also director of the

Science of Networks in Communities (SONIC) research

group. He is also a director of the Web Science trust.

His research investigates factors that lead to the

formation, maintenance, and dissolution of dynamically

linked social and knowledge networks in a wide variety

of contexts, including business, translational science

and engineering communities, public health networks,

and virtual worlds. Contractor’s research program has

been funded continuously for more than a decade by

major grants from the National Science Foundation, with

additional current funding from the National Institutes of

Health, Air Force Office Research Lab, Army Research

Institute, Army Research Laboratory, and MacArthur

Foundation. He holds a PhD from the University of

Southern California.

Janet Fulk is a professor of communi-

cation in the Annenberg School for

Communication and professor of

management and organization in the

Marshall School of Business at the

University of Southern California. Her interests include

knowledge networks, information technology for

strategic alliance networks, social aspects of knowledge

and distributed intelligence, social media use, network-

ing strategies of nongovernmental organizations, and

online communities. Fulk’s research has been spon-

sored by a series of grants from the National Science

Foundation as well as private corporations and govern-

mental organizations. A fellow of the Academy of

Management, Fulk is coauthor of Policing Hawthorne

(South Bay Media, 2000) and coeditor of Shaping

Organizational Form: Communication, Connection

and Community (Sage, 1999) and Organizations and

Communication Technology (Sage, 1990), winner of

the National Communication Association’s 1990 Best

Book Award. She earned her PhD and MBA from the

Ohio State University.

Amir Goldberg is a PhD candidate in

sociology at Princeton University. His

research — ranging from economic,

cultural, and organizational sociology

to social network analysis and the

dynamics of interaction and collective action — seeks

to understand the social mechanisms that underlie how

people construct meaning and consequently pursue

action. With Paul DiMaggio he has worked on developing

relational class analysis, a new network-based method

for addressing ideational heterogeneity in attitudinal data.

His dissertation compares the coevolution of social

classifications and interpersonal interaction in two online

communities, one financial and the other musical.

Shane Greenstein is the Elinor and

Wendell Hobbs Professor of Manage-

ment and Strategy at the Kellogg

School of Management at Northwestern

University and was chair of Kellogg’s

Department of Management and Strategy from 2002

to 2005. He is a leading researcher in the business

economics of computing, communications, and Internet

infrastructure. He writes for other academics and for

policy and business audiences and is regularly quoted

in national and local media. Since 1995 he has been a

regular columnist and essayist for IEEE Micro, where

he comments on the economics of microelectronics.

Many related essays appear in his blog, virulent word

of mouse. He is currently writing a history of the first

decade of the commercial Internet in the United States.

Greenstein is the codirector of the Program on the

Economics of Digitization at the National Bureau of

Economic Research and business and economics

subeditor for Communications of the ACM. He also

reviews for a wide assortment of major journals in

economics and information science and for a wide

assortment of organizations. Greenstein earned his bach-

elor’s degree from University of California at Berkeley and

his PhD from Stanford University, both in economics.

Wendy Hall is professor of computer

science and dean of the Faculty

of Physical and Applied Sciences at

the United Kingdom’s University of

Southampton, where she earned her

PhD. The influence of her work has been significant in

such areas as digital libraries, the development of the

Semantic Web, and the emerging research discipline of

web science. A director of the Web Science Trust, she

is a past president of the Association for Computing

Machinery. Hall is an elected fellow of the Royal Society

and the Royal Academy of Engineering and was named

a Dame Commander of the Order of the British Empire

by Queen Elizabeth II.

Keith N. Hampton is an assistant

professor in the Annenberg School for

Communication at the University of

Pennsylvania. His research focuses on

the relationship between new informa-

tion and communication technologies, social networks,

and the urban environment. Recent publications include

articles in the Journal of Communication, New Media &

Society, and Information, Communication & Society.

Hampton earned a PhD from the University of Toronto.

Jiawei Han is a professor of computer

science at the University of Illinois at

Urbana-Champaign, where he is the

director of the Information Network

Academic Research Center, supported

by the US Army Research Lab’s Network Science-

Collaborative Technology Alliance program. His research

has focused on data mining, information network

analysis, and database systems, resulting in more than

500 publications. The founding editor-in-chief of the

Association for Computing Machinery’s Transactions on

Knowledge Discovery from Data, Han is fellow of ACM

and IEEE and serves on the editorial boards of several

other journals. He has received IBM Faculty Awards,

HP Innovation Awards, the ACM SIGKDD Innovation

Award, and IEEE’s Computer Society Technical Achieve-

ment Award and W. Wallace McDowell Award. Han’s

book Data Mining: Concepts and Techniques

(Morgan Kaufmann) has been used as a textbook

worldwide. He earned his PhD from the University of

Wisconsin–Madison.

Eszter Hargittai is associate profes-

sor of communication studies in the

School of Communication and a faculty

associate of the Institute for Policy

Research at Northwestern University,

where she heads the Web Use Project. She is also a

fellow at Harvard’s Berkman Center for Internet and

Society, where she spent the 2008–09 academic year

in residence. Hargittai’s research focuses on the social

and policy implications of information technologies,

with a particular interest in how differences in people’s

web-use skills influence what they do online. She

received her PhD from Princeton University, where she

was a Wilson Scholar.

James Hendler is the Tetherless

World Professor of Computer and

Cognitive Science and the assistant

dean for information technology and

web science at Rensselaer Polytechnic

Institute, where he is a faculty affiliate of the Experimen-

tal Multimedia Performing Arts Center. In the United

Kingdom he is a director of Web Science Trust and a

visiting professor at the Institute of Creative Technology

at Leicester’s DeMontfort University. Hendler has

authored some 200 technical papers in the areas of

Semantic Web, artificial intelligence, agent-based

computing, and high-performance processing. One of

the inventors of the Semantic Web, Hendler was the

recipient of a 1995 Fulbright Foundation Fellowship.

He is a member of the US Air Force Science Advisory

Board and a fellow of the American Association for

Artificial Intelligence, the British Computer Society,

and the IEEE. Awarded a US Air Force Exceptional

Civilian Service Medal, he is the former chief scientist

of the Information Systems Office at the US Defense

Advanced Research Projects Agency. Hendler is the

editor-in-chief emeritus of IEEE Intelligent Systems and

the first computer scientist to serve on the board of

reviewing editors for Science. Last year he was named

one of the 20 most innovative professors in America by

Playboy magazine and selected as an “Internet web

expert” by the US government. He holds a PhD from

Brown University.

Ramesh Jain is Donald Bren Profes-

sor in Information and Computer

Sciences at the University of California,

Irvine, where his research focuses on

searching multimedia data and creating

Event Webs for experiential computing. Previously he

served on the faculties of the Georgia Institute of

Technology, the University of California, San Diego, the

University of Michigan, Wayne State University, and

Indian Institute of Technology, Kharagpur, where he

earned his PhD. An entrepreneur, researcher, and

educator, Jain has cofounded and initially managed a

number of companies before turning them over to

professional management: PRAJA for event-based

business activity monitoring (acquired by Tibco); Virage

for media management solutions and visual information

management (a NASDAQ company acquired by

Autonomy); ImageWare for surface modeling, reverse

engineering rapid prototyping, and inspection (acquired

by SDRC); Lambent (acquired by GlobalLogic); and

Seraja. Currently he is involved in two new start-ups,

mChron and Stikco Studio, as cofounder and adviser.

He has also served as adviser for several of the largest

companies in media and search space. Recipient of the

Association for Computing Machinery SIGMM Technical

Achievement Award, among other honors, he is a fellow

of ACM, IEEE, SPIE, the Association for the Advance-

ment of Artificial Intelligence, and the International

Association of Pattern Recognition.

Barbara Jasny serves as the deputy

editor for commentary for Science,

the weekly journal of the American

Association for the Advancement of

Science, of which she is an elected

fellow. In this position she coordinates the activities of

editors responsible for the journal’s Perspectives,

Letters, Book Reviews, and Policy Forums. She also

solicits research papers and evaluates research reports

for publication in genetics, medicine, and the social

sciences. For the past 25 years Jasny has taken the

lead in special issues on the genome project, AIDS,

molecular medicine, and science and society. She is

an author of more than 60 articles and commentaries

dealing with science, society, and scientific advances.

In exploring new avenues of communication at Science,

she has been involved in creating wall charts, CDs, web

features, and podcasts. Jasny earned a PhD from

Rockefeller University.

Aleks Krotoski is a researcher and

journalist who writes about and studies

technology and interactivity. Currently

she is researcher in residence at the

British Library, where she is examining

the future of digital technologies in research contexts.

Her academic work focuses on the makeup of online

relationships, the social implications of the web, the

influence of online interactions, and how information

spreads around online and offline social networks.

Krotoski writes for The Guardian and Observer news-

papers and hosts Tech Weekly, their technology

podcast. Her writing is also featured by BBC Technol-

ogy, Nature, New Statesman, MIT Technology Review,

and The Telegraph. She recently completed the Emmy-

and BAFTA-winning BBC 2 series Virtual Revolution,

about the economic, political, interpersonal, and

psychological implications of the Internet. Krotoski

holds a PhD from the University of Surrey.

Paul Leonardi is assistant professor

of communication studies in the School

of Communication at Northwestern

University. His research and teaching

focus on how organizations can

employ advanced information technologies to more

effectively create and share knowledge. This focus

draws attention to the processes through which

technological artifacts and informal communication

networks coevolve within organizational contexts. His

research has been funded by the National Science

Foundation, the Association for Healthcare Research

Quality, and the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation. Leonardi

has received awards for his research from the Academy

of Management, the American Sociological Association,

the International Communication Association, the

National Communication Association, and the Associa-

tion for Information Systems. He earned his PhD at

Stanford University.

Jure Leskovec is an assistant

professor of computer science at

Stanford University. His research

focuses on the analysis and modeling

of large real-world social and informa-

tion networks as the study of phenomena across the

social, technological, and natural worlds. Problems he

investigates are motivated by large-scale data, the web,

and social media. His work has received five best paper

awards, won the Association for Computing Machinery

KDD Cup, and topped the Battle of the Sensor Net-

works competition. Leskovec received his PhD from

Carnegie Mellon University.

Kevin Lynch is professor of mechani-

cal engineering in the McCormick

School of Engineering and Applied

Science at Northwestern University,

where he is codirector of the North-

western Institute on Complex Systems and codirector

of the Laboratory for Intelligent Mechanical Systems. His

research focuses on self-organizing multiagent systems,

bio-inspired sensing and control, robot manipulation

and locomotion, and functional electrical stimulation for

restoration of human function. Lynch is an IEEE fellow,

editor of IEEE’s Transactions on Robotics, and a former

member of the Defense Advanced Research Project

Agency’s Defense Science Study Group. He holds a

PhD from Carnegie Mellon University.

Michael Macy is Goldwin Smith

Professor of Sociology and director of

the Social Dynamics Laboratory at

Cornell University. His recent research

uses data from Twitter to track diurnal

and seasonal mood changes; telephone call logs to

measure network structure at the population level; and

Amazon book reviews to determine whether reviewers

are influenced by previous reviews. He has also used

computational models to study the spread of high-

threshold social contagions on small-world and scale-

free networks. Macy’s research has been published in

such leading journals as Science, Proceedings of the

National Academy of Sciences, the American Journal of

Sociology, the American Sociological Review, and the

Annual Review of Sociology. He earned his PhD from

Harvard University.

Madhav Marathe is a professor

of computer science at Virginia

Polytechnic Institute and State Univer-

sity, where he is deputy director of the

Virginia Bioinformatics Institute’s

Network Dynamics and Simulation Science Laboratory,

leading its basic and applied research program. The

work is funded by research grants from the National

Institutes of Health, Department of Defense, Department

of Human Services, and National Science Foundation.

His research focuses on developing innovative comput-

ing technologies for reliable, secure, and sustainable

societal systems; policy informatics; theoretical com-

puter science; public health epidemiology; social,

information, and communication networks; and perva-

sive high-performance computing systems. Marathe

earned his PhD at the University at Albany, State

University of New York.

Peter Monge is professor of commu-

nication in the Annenberg School for

Communication and professor of

management and organization in the

Marshall School of Business at the

University of Southern California. His publications

include the books Theories of Communication

Networks (Oxford, 2003), Communicating and

Organizing (Addison-Wesley, 1977), Multivariate

Techniques in Human Communication Research

(Academic Press, 1981), Policing Hawthorne (South

Bay Media, 2000) and Reasoning with Statistics: How

to Read Quantitative Research (5th edition, Wadsworth,

2000) as well as theoretical and research articles on

organizational communication networks, evolutionary

and ecological theory, collaborative information sys-

tems, globalization, and research methods. A former

editor of Communication Research, Monge is a fellow

and former president of the International Communica-

tion Association. His numerous honors include the

Distinguished Scholar Award from the Organizational

Communication and Information Systems Division of the

Academy of Management, the Research Award from

the Organizational Communication Division of the

National Communication Association, and the B. Aubrey

Fisher Mentorship Award from the International Com-

munication Association. He holds a PhD from Michigan

State University.

Karine Nahon is an associate profes-

sor at the Information School of the

University of Washington, where she

is also a faculty adjunct in the Depart-

ment of Communication, affiliated

faculty member in the Center for Communication and

Civic Engagement, and former director of the Informa-

tion and Society Center. Her research focuses on

networks’ information politics and policy, particularly

network gatekeeping, and questions of power and

networks. Currently she directs the Virality of Information

(retroV) research group, which received the Google

Research Award, and participates in decision-making

forums on information technology policy through the

United Nations, the Internet Society, and the Israeli

parliament’s science and technology committee. Nahon

earned her PhD at Tel Aviv University.

Mark Newman is Paul Dirac

Collegiate Professor of Physics and

professor in the Center for the Study

of Complex Systems at the University

of Michigan. Previously he served

on the staff of the Santa Fe Institute. His research

centers on social and information networks and on

methods for making sense of the vast amounts of data

about these networks that are now becoming available.

Newman received a PhD in physics from the University

of Oxford and conducted postdoctoral research at

Cornell University.

Beth Simone Noveck is a professor

of law at New York Law School. She

served in the White House as the

nation’s first deputy chief technology

officer and leader of the White House

Open Government Initiative, and with New York Law

School students she designed and built the US govern-

ment’s first expert network. Founder of the Democracy

Design Workshop, Noveck also developed Democracy

Island and the Cairns Project and is spearheading

the development of ORGPedia, a platform for public

corporate accountability data and for organizational

evolution tracking. The John D. and Catherine T.

MacArthur Foundation has awarded Noveck a grant

to develop a multiyear interdisciplinary research agenda

on the impact of digital networks on institutions and on

use of that technology to strengthen democratic culture.

Named one of the “Hundred Most Creative People in

Business” by Fast Company magazine and one of the

“Top Five Game Changers” by Politico, she is coeditor

of The State of Play: Law, Games, and Virtual Worlds

(NYU, 2006) and author of Wiki Government: How

Technology Can Make Government Better, Democracy

Stronger, and Citizens More Powerful (Brookings

Institution, 2009), which will appear this year in an

audio edition and in Arabic and Chinese. Noveck

earned a PhD as a Fulbright Scholar at the University

of Innsbruck and a JD from Yale Law School.

Barbara J. O’Keefe is dean of the

School of Communication, Annenberg

University Professor, and professor of

communication studies at Northwest-

ern University. Previously she was a

professor in the School of Information at the University

of Michigan and director of the UM Media Union, a

center for development and application of advanced

communication and information technologies. She has

also served on the faculties of Wayne State University,

Pennsylvania State University, and the University of

Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, where she earned her

PhD. O’Keefe has studied the development of commu-

nication competence across the lifespan as well as the

impact of collaboration and learning technologies on

individuals and groups. Her research has been sup-

ported by grants from the National Science Foundation,

the Department of Defense, the National Center for

Supercomputing Applications, and the Markle Founda-

tion. Author or coauthor of more than 75 articles,

reviews, and chapters in books and refereed conference

proceedings, she coedited Volume I, Paradigm Issues,

and Volume II, Paradigm Exemplars, of Rethinking

Communication, surveys of the state of the art in

communication theory and research.

Julio Ottino is the dean of McCormick

School of Engineering and Applied

Science at Northwestern University,

where he is also Robert McCormick

Institute Professor, Walter P. Murphy

Professor, and professor of chemical and biological

engineering and of mechanical engineering. His

research focuses on complex systems and nonlinear

dynamics. A member of the National Academy of

Engineering and the American Academy of Arts and

Sciences, he was named one of the “One Hundred

Engineers of the Modern Era” by the American Institute

of Chemical Engineers and was selected to give its

62nd Institute Lecture. Ottino is also a painter and is

working on a book about the creative processes

connecting art, technology, and science. He holds a

PhD from the University of Minnesota.

Marshall Scott Poole is a professor in

the Department of Communication and

director of the Institute for Computing

in the Humanities, Arts, and Social

Sciences at the University of Illinois at

Urbana-Champaign. Author or editor of 10 books and

more than 150 articles and chapters, he earned his PhD

from the University of Wisconsin–Madison.

Walter W. Powell is professor of

education, sociology, organizational

behavior, management science and

engineering, public policy, and commu-

nication at Stanford University and

an external faculty member at the Santa Fe Institute.

Previously he taught at Yale University, the Massachu-

setts Institute of Technology, and the University of

Arizona. Powell works in the areas of organization

theory, economic sociology, and the sociology of

science. His interests focus on the processes through

which knowledge is transferred across organizations

and the role of networks in facilitating or hindering

innovation and of institutions in codifying ideas. Winner

of the Max Weber Prize and cowinner of the Viviana

Zelizer Prize for best papers, he was also recognized as

coauthor of Administrative Science Quarterly’s most

influential 2002 publication, and he coauthored a 1983

paper that is the most cited article in the history of the

American Sociological Review. Powell is the sole or joint

author or editor of The Culture and Commerce of

Publishing (Basic Books, 1982), Getting into Print: The

Decision-Making Process in Scholarly Publishing

(University of Chicago, 1985), The New Institutionalism

in Organizational Analysis (University of Chicago, 1991),

Private Action and the Public Good (Yale, 1997), The

Nonprofit Sector (Yale, 2006), and the recently com-

pleted The Emergence of Organizations and Markets.

A foreign member of the Swedish Royal Academy of

Science, Powell received his PhD from Stony Brook

University, State University of New York, and holds

honorary degrees from Uppsala University, Copenhagen

Business School, and the Helsinki School of Economics.

Balaraman Ravindran is an associate

professor in the Department of Com-

puter Science and Engineering at the

Indian Institute of Technology Madras.

His current research interests span the

broader area of machine learning, ranging from spatio-

temporal abstractions in reinforcement learning to social

network analysis and data/text mining. Program cochair

for the 2010 Pacific-Asian Conference on Knowledge

Discovery and Data Mining, he has coauthored several

research papers, including the chapter on reinforcement

learning in the Handbook of Neural Computation

(Oxford). Ravindran received his PhD from the University

of Massachusetts Amherst.

Felix Reed-Tsochas is the James

Martin Lecturer in Complex Systems

at the Institute for Science, Innovation

and Society at the University of

Oxford, where he is a codirector of

the CABDyN Complexity Centre. His original research

background is in theoretical condensed matter physics,

and he currently works on the dynamic and functional

properties of complex networks in a variety of contexts.

Recent examples include the evolution of supplier

networks in manufacturing industries, secondary

extinctions in food webs, mutualistic and host-parasitoid

networks, online social networks, social group structure

and mobile communications, and the impact of social

structure on group loans in microfinance. Reed-Tsochas

holds a PhD from the University of Cambridge.

Richard Rogers holds the chair

in New Media and Digital Culture at

the University of Amsterdam, where

he earned his PhD. Currently a

visiting scholar at the University of

Pennsylvania’s Annenberg School for Communication,

he is the director of the Govcom.org Foundation, best

known for the development of the Issue Crawler, a

server-side network location and visualization software.

Rogers also heads the Digital Methods Initiative, which

is reworking methods for Internet research with some

30 research tools online. His forthcoming book Digital

Methods is to be published by MIT Press. Rogers’s

book Information Politics on the Web (MIT, 2004) was

named the 2005 best book of the year by the American

Society for Information Science and Technology.

Céline Rozenblat is professor of

urban geography at the University of

Lausanne. In addition, she currently

serves as vice dean of the Urban

Commission of the International

Geographical Union. Her research focuses on the

relations between location evolutions and networks

dynamics in systems of cities. To develop these

topics comparatively, she has built databases on

large European cities’ samples and on networks.

Rozenblat’s honors include the Lauréate du concours

de la fondation de Famille Sandoz and the Prix de

Science Régionale Philippe Aydalot. She holds a PhD

from the University of Paris I.

Nigel Shadbolt is deputy head for

research of the School of Electronics

and Computer Science at the Univer-

sity of Southampton. He is also a

director of the Web Science Trust and

the Web Foundation. Named a government information

adviser to help transform public access to government

information and a member of the Public Sector Trans-

parency Board that oversees public data release, he is

chair of the Local Public Data Panel within the Depart-

ment of Communities and Local Government. Shadbolt

has researched and published across a wide range of

topics, from cognitive psychology to computational

neuroscience, from artificial intelligence to the Semantic

Web. He was one of the originators of web science, a

discipline calling for a systems-level approach to the

web that recognizes the social and technical factors

shaping its development. Also heavily involved with the

commercial exploitation of research, Shadbolt has

helped found such companies as Garlik, Tacit Connex-

ions, and Seme4. He is a fellow of the Royal Academy

of Engineering. He holds a PhD from the University of

Edinburgh.

Boleslaw K. Szymanski is the Claire

and Roland Schmitt Distinguished

Professor and the director of the

Army Research Laboratory Social

and Cognitive Networks Academic

Research Center at the Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute.

His research focuses on computer networks and

technology-based social networks. Winner of the British

Computer Society’s Wilkes Medal, he was a national

lecturer for the Association for Computing Machinery

and has published more than 300 scientific articles.

Szymanski is a foreign member of the National Academy

of Science in Poland and a fellow of IEEE. He received

his PhD from Poland’s National Academy of Sciences.

Brian Uzzi holds the Richard L.

Thomas Chair in Leadership at the

Kellogg School of Management of

Northwestern University, where he is

also codirector of the Northwestern

Institute on Complex Systems and a professor in the

Department of Sociology and the Robert R. McCormick

School of Engineering and Applied Science. Uzzi

previously taught on the faculties at INSEAD, the

University of Chicago, and the University of California,

Berkeley, where he was the Warren E. and Carol

Spieker Professor of Leadership in 2008. His research

— using social network analysis and complexity theory

to understand outstanding human achievement — has

won several scholarly contribution prizes and has been

awarded grants from the National Science Foundation,

the National Institutes of Health, the US Army Research

Labs, and the National Bureau of Economic Research.

Uzzi holds a PhD from Stony Brook University, State

University of New York.

Peter van den Besselaar is a

professor in the Department of

Organization Science and the Network

Institute at the Vrije Universiteit

Amsterdam, where he holds the

Rathenau Instituut–Royal Netherlands Academy of

Sciences chair of organization and dynamics of

science. Previously he was research director and head

of the science system assessment department at the

Rathenau Instituut, associate professor of social

informatics and then professor of communication

studies and e-social science at the University of

Amsterdam, and director of the Netherlands Social

Science Data Archive. Van den Besselaar holds a PhD

from the University of Amsterdam.

Lidwien van de Wijngaert is assis-

tant professor at the Netherlands’

University of Twente. Previously she

worked at the Institute for Information

and Computing Sciences at Utrecht

University and the Telematica Instituut, where she did

her PhD research. Her work focuses on the adoption,

use, and effects of information and communications

technology from a user perspective, employing survey

and network analysis as core methodologies. Her

research has involved collaboration with such national

partners as the Technical University of Delft and the

Telematica Institute and such international partners as

Syracuse University, Ghent University, and Northwestern

University. In addition to writing articles published in a

number of international journals, van de Wijngaert is

the coauthor of a textbook on information and commu-

nications technology in organizations that has been

published in both Dutch and English.

Balazs Vedres is associate professor

of sociology and social anthropology

at Central European University. His

research furthers the agenda of

understanding historical dynamics in

network systems, combining insights from historical

sociology, social network analysis, and studies of

complex systems in physics and biology. His contribu-

tion is to combine historical sensitivities to patterns of

processes in time with a network analytic sensitivity to

patterns of connectedness cross-sectionally. Over the

last decade Vedres developed data collection and

analysis techniques to handle large historical datasets.

His research results have been published in the top

sociology journals, including his most recent publication

in the American Journal of Sociology. Vedres earned a

PhD in sociology from Columbia University.

Fei-Yue Wang has served since 2002

as the director of the Key Laboratory

of Complex Systems and Intelligence

Science at the Chinese Academy

of Sciences, where he is also the

director of the Center for Social Computing and Parallel

Management and where he founded the Intelligent

Control and Systems Engineering Center. From 2005

to 2010 he was the dean of the School of Software

Engineering and vice president for research, education,

and academic exchange at China’s Xi’an Jiaotong

University. Previously he was professor and director

of the Program in Advanced Research for Complex

Systems at the University of Arizona. His research

interests include social computing, web science, and

parallel management; agent-based control systems and

linguistic dynamic systems; and real-time embedded

systems, intelligent systems, and their applications.

He has published more than 300 books, chapters,

and journal and conference papers in those areas.

Currently editor-in-chief of IEEE’s Intelligent Systems

and Transactions on Intelligent Transportation Systems,

Wang previously served as editor-in-chief of the Inter-

national Journal of Intelligent Control and Systems

and the Series in Intelligent Control and Intelligent

Automation. He has served as general or program chair

of more than 20 international conferences for IEEE, the

Institute for Operations Research in the Management

Sciences, the Association for Computing Machinery,

and the American Society of Mechanical Engineers.

A former president of the IEEE Intelligent Transportation

Systems Society, the Chinese Association for Science

and Technology, and the American Zhu Kezhen Educa-

tion Foundation, Wang is member of Sigma Xi and an

elected fellow of IEEE, ASME, the International Council

on Systems Engineering, the International Federation of

Automatic Control, and the American Association for

the Advancement of Science. His honors include

China’s National Prize in Natural Sciences and ACM’s

Outstanding Scientist Award. Wang received his PhD

from Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute.

Stanley Wasserman is the Rudy

Professor of Psychological and

Brain Sciences and of Statistics in

the Departments of Sociology and

Psychology at Indiana University

Bloomington, where he helped create the new Depart-

ment of Statistics and became its first chair. Previously

he held faculty positions at Carnegie Mellon University,

the University of Minnesota, and the University of Illinois,

where he was also a part-time faculty member in the

Beckman Institute of Advanced Science and Technol-

ogy. Wasserman has held visiting appointments at

Columbia University and the University of Melbourne.

Best known for his work on statistical models for social

networks, he has published widely in sociology, psy-

chology, and statistics journals and has been elected to

a variety of leadership positions in the Classification

Society of North America and the American Statistical

Association. His books have been published by Sage

Publications and Cambridge University Press. A fellow

of the Royal Statistical Society and an honorary fellow of

the American Statistical Association and the American

Association for the Advancement of Science, Wasser-

man has served as book review editor of Chance and

as an associate editor of Psychometrika, the Journal of

the American Statistical Association, Sociological

Methodology, and other statistics and methodological

journals. His research has been supported over the

years by the National Science Foundation, the Office

of Naval Research, the Army Research Laboratory,

and the National Institute of Mental Health. Wasserman

was also chief scientist of Visible Path Corporation, a

California software firm developing social network

analysis for corporate settings. He holds a PhD from

Harvard University.

Duncan Watts is a principal research

scientist at Yahoo! Research, where he

directs the human social dynamics

group. Previously he was a professor

of sociology at Columbia University,

where he taught from 2000 to 2007. He has also served

on the external faculties of the Santa Fe Institute and of

Nuffield College at the University of Oxford. His research

on social networks and collective dynamics has

appeared in a wide range of journals, from Nature,

Science, and Physical Review Letters to the American

Journal of Sociology. Watts is the author of Six Degrees:

The Science of a Connected Age (Norton, 2003) and

the forthcoming Everything is Obvious (Once You Know

the Answer) (Crown Business, 2011). He holds a PhD

from Cornell University.

Matthew Weber is a postdoctoral

research associate at the Center for

Technology, Entertainment, and Media

at Duke University’s Fuqua School of

Business. His research uses mixed

methods — including social network analysis, archival

research, and interviews — to examine organizational

change and adaptation, both internal and external, in

response to new information communication technol-

ogy. Weber’s recent work focuses on the transformation

of the news media industry in the United States in

reaction to new forms of media production. He received

his PhD from the University of Southern California.

James G. Webster is a professor of

communication studies in the School of

Communication at Northwestern

University. His research focuses on

television audience behavior and

patterns of media consumption across digital platforms.

Secondary areas of interest are audience measurement,

media industries, and the social impact of new media.

Webster is the author of Ratings Analysis: The Theory

and Practice of Audience Research (Lawrence Erlbaum,

2005) and serves on the editorial boards of the Journal

of Broadcasting & Electronic Media and the Journal of

Communication. He has been a consultant to Nielsen,

Arbitron, Initiative Media, and the Rudd Center at Yale

University. Webster holds a PhD from Indiana University.

Jeffrey R. Young is a senior writer

covering technology for the Chronicle

of Higher Education, where his news

articles and features cover information

technology’s effect on teaching,

research, and student life. He also leads that publica-

tion’s Wired Campus blog, writes the monthly news-

analysis column College 2.0, and cohosts the Tech

Therapy podcast. Young has written for such national

publications as the New York Times and the Industry

Standard, and one of his articles was included in the

anthology The Best of Technology Writing 2007. Young

also teaches multimedia storytelling as an adjunct

faculty member at the University of Maryland’s Philip

Merrill College of Journalism. He holds a bachelor’s

degree from Princeton University and a master’s from

Georgetown University.

Daniel Zeng is associate professor of

management information systems in

the Eller College of Management at the

University of Arizona and a faculty

member of the Chinese Academy of

Sciences. Zeng’s research interests include intelligence

and security informatics, infectious disease informatics,

social computing, recommender systems, software

agents, and applied operations research and game

theory. Author of one published monograph and more

than 180 peer-reviewed articles, Zeng has also coedited

15 books and published proceedings. He serves on

editorial boards of 15 information technology journals

and has chaired many conferences, including the IEEE

International Conference on Intelligence and Security

Informatics, the Biosurveillance and Biosecurity Work-

shop, and the International Workshop on Social

Computing. His research has been funded by the

National Science Foundation, the Department of Human

Services, the Chinese Academy of Sciences, and

China’s National Natural Science Foundation, Ministry of

Science and Technology, and Ministry of Health. He

earned a PhD in industrial administration from Carnegie

Mellon University.

Thanks to

Marilyn Logan, SONIC

Nicole-Michelle Smith, NICO

Rebecca Wee, School of Communication

and volunteers

Jennifer Brown

Hugh Devlin

Yun Huang

Brian Keegan

Edwin Lim

Jordan Liu

Alina Lungeanu

Nick Merrill

Tommy Rousse

Alejandro Valdivieso

Brooke Foucault Welles

Ryan Whalen

Lindsay Young

Katherine Zhu

Mengxiao Zhu

Sponsors

Funding for the workshop is provided by the MacArthur Foundation, a National Science Foundation grant

to Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute (IIS-0957718), and Northwestern University.

Northwestern University is an equal opportunity, affirmative action educator and employer. © 2011 Northwestern University. All rights reserved. 3-11/75/AE-HC/1098-1